Confessions of a GTA Virgin: San Andreas

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is the single best-selling videogame in the United States, with more than 8.6 million units sold. Worldwide, it has sold more than 21.5 million units.

How many of those people have actually beaten the game? How many have even gotten past the first few hours of missions? I’d kill to have those stats in front of me, because I’m sure they’re shocking.

Talking to people about the Grand Theft Auto series over the past few weeks, I quickly came to the realization that in concentrating on the game’s mission structure and awkwardly designed gameplay, I wasn’t actually experiencing the game the way most players do. I’d heard it thrown around that "nobody ever beats a GTA" or "nobody plays the missions." Sounds hyperbolic — and yet I don’t think even that goes far enough to describe the majority of GTA players’ approach to the series.

They cheat. And by trying to actually play through the Grand Theft Auto games without giving myself invincibility, infinite cash, or a never-ending supply of rocket launchers, I might have been getting a vastly different experience than the majority of the series’ biggest fans.

Welcome back to "Confessions of a Grand Theft Auto Virgin," the weekly series in which I overcome my lifelong aversion to the GTA series and play each of the games. This week, we load up the wagons and head to Californ-i-ay, and sunny San Andreas.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004)

As I played through each successive installment of Grand Theft Auto, I’d been paying close attention to the development of the cinematic scenes. GTA III was firmly in the embryonic stage. Vice City looked much more like a movie, if only an alright one. But San Andreas kicked things into high gear. The opening cinematics, especially a high-tension early scene in which several of the main characters argued in a cemetery, were absolutely riveting.

When I mentioned this to 1up’s Jeremy Parish as we were recording an upcoming Retronauts podcast about the series, he pointed out that one reason why San Andreas‘ story is stickier is that the main character, C.J., is more sympathetic. Tommy Vercetti from Vice City is really kind of a jerk, he said, but C.J., avenging his mother’s death, is driven by something more than criminal ambition.

Also, I don’t know if you noticed this, but he’s black.

Last year, we got into an interesting back-and-forth with blogger Jason Ellis, who penned a list of notable black main characters in videogames. Ellis called San Andreas "the first time that a AAA series chose a black protagonist and nobody batted an eye. It wasn’t a topic of conversation, it just was."

While it’s true that no eyes were batted over C.J.’s ethnicity, I don’t think it was a given. I do seem to remember there being a good deal of hand-wringing about it prior to San Andreas‘ release — would it be a controversial choice? As it turns out, however risky it was for Rockstar Games to switch up the setting, it didn’t matter at all to players.

Even riskier was the shift away from a setting that was practically cartoonish to one much more real. Mafia violence isn’t something anyone is actually afraid of. Bootleggers aren’t mowing each other down with tommy guns anymore. But gang warfare? That’s on the news every night, at least where I live.

And perhaps all of this would have stirred up some media controversy — were it not for the Hot Coffee sex minigame scandal, which dominated discussion of San Andreas.

Last week, over lunch with Wired.com columnist Clive Thompson, I told him about "Confessions" when he pointed out that the sheer length of videogames, nowadays, is keeping critics from becoming conversant in all but a few of them. He told me that the only person he knows who "even came close" to beating Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was a friend of his who was bedridden for three weeks and did nothing but play San Andreas.

Even then, Clive emphasized: He only came close to finishing the game.

I pointed out that most people don’t even bother trying. My brother’s friend, who was visiting San Francisco last week, told me that in his experience, GTA was all about turning on the cheat codes and running wild. This made a lot of sense to me. I’d heard about the joys of just driving around, raising your Wanted level and causing havoc. But in my experience with GTA III two weeks prior, you really couldn’t get your criminal notoriety even halfway up the scale without it pretty much being a given that you were going to get busted, fast. How do you cause mayhem when the cops are so adept at taking you down?

You cheat, of course. Each GTA game has a whole list of cheat codes that you can input when the game is running, from the bizarre (all pedestrians carry rocket launchers) to the helpful (invincibility, infinite ammunition). Buff yourself up enough so you can survive anything, and you can feel free to raise your Wanted level to maximum — also conveniently done with a cheat code — and let the cops come after you.

Did I say the cops? Sorry: When your Wanted level is that high, it’s the army that comes after you. Suddenly there were choppers above me, two tanks rolling down the Los Santos boulevards, and a crew of infantrymen trying to take invincible C.J. down. Here we go! I led them in a very slow chase down the streets, because I had jacked one of the tanks. I punched a soldier until he was dead and took his submachine gun, which I used to slaughter everything around me before hopping back in a tank.

Man, this was totally boring. I thought: People do this for fun?

But then I realized, again, that I was doing it wrong. What I should be asking was not what other people do for fun in a GTA game, but what sounded fun to me. I instantly realized what that was. I live in San Francisco, which has a counterpart in San Andreas called San Fierro. I couldn’t go there by normal means at this early point in the game, and judging by the game’s infamous length it would probably take me another 15 hours of gameplay to get there.

But with cheat codes at my disposal, it was easy: I gave C.J. massive jumping ability and infinite lung power, so I could jump and swim around the bridge that blocked me from going to San Fierro. And I entered the code that kept the Wanted level at minimum, so the cops wouldn’t get in the way of my journey.

Finally arriving in San Fierro after a car trip that had to have taken at least 15 minutes or so — San Andreas is a massive chunk of game geography — I took to the streets and drove around, checking for landmarks I recognized. As it turns out, San Fierro is a horrible dystopian vision of San Francisco’s future in which the Haight/Ashbury district takes up the entire western half of the city, engulfing my quiet neighborhood in a patchouli-scented haze.

Not only that, but the hippies, having taken over half the city, have abolished Fisherman’s Wharf, the garish bayside tourist trap of seafood restaurants and souvenir shops that figures so prominently in the first Crazy Taxi. They have also, for some reason, made the cable cars go in a massive loop around the city. Even worse, the trolleys are indestructible and you can’t hijack them, which I was really disappointed by.

But then, having in all other areas taken serious liberties with the design of San Fierro, Rockstar included a perfect scale replica of Lombard Street.

It was an interesting little trip. But having given it the old college try, but I can’t say that I’m very much into the idea of open-ended play, GTA-style. I like games that have goals set out for me and that reward me when I accomplish them. Grand Theft Auto has these, but even in San Andreas they seem like a bit of an afterthought. And that’s what I’ve been struggling with. I’m looking for GTA IV to continue to move the series along this path, of tightening up the controls, eliminating the fluff, presenting me with a compelling single-player game that I don’t get frustrated or annoyed with.

But what if, say, 19 million of the 20 million San Andreas players couldn’t care less?

Rockstar might not have a mandate to fix these things. Moreover, tightening up the way that Grand Theft Auto plays as a single-player, linear game might actually adversely affect what it seems like the majority of players want. They like that the world isn’t quite sewn up tightly, that they can subvert the rules and cause chaos.

But for me, there’s only a limited amount of entertainment value that I can get out of that sort of experience. That’s why I’m now quite interested to play Grand Theft Auto IV: To see if Rockstar’s next-gen update to the series keeps me hooked, or if it simply makes it clear that my iffy feelings about the series stem not from the fact that the games are aging badly, but from the fact that GTA just isn’t made for me.

Grand Theft Auto IV releases on Tuesday, April 29. Since I am 99% sure I won’t be able to review the game by then, I’ll finish this series off with a look at the portable Liberty City Stories.